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Home > Financial Quotes > Women in Business

Financial Quotes

Women in Business Quotes

  • "Men are troublesome. They complain about trifles a woman wouldn’t notice. The office boys … complain that the temperature of the building is too hot or too cold … If they have a slight headache, they stay at home."
    Clara Lanza (1859–1939), US journalist
    Source: “Women Clerks in New York,” Cosmopolitan (1891)
  • "Well-ventilated, well-lighted, and sanitarily kept workrooms, rest-rooms and other creature comforts provided in factories, stores, and office buildings are largely the results of women's presence in industry."
    Edith Johnson (1891–1954), US writer and educator
    Source: To Women of the Business World (1923)
  • "Total commitment to family and total commitment to career is possible, but fatiguing."
    Muriel Fox (1928–), US business executive
    Source: Quoted in “Wait Late to Marry,” New Woman (Barbara Jordan Moore, October 1971)
  • "Women are naturally good motivators, good at juggling different projects and issues at the same time, and more cooperative rather than aggressive and confrontational."
    Bridget A. Macaskill (1949–), British nonexecutive director for J. Sainsbury and former president and CEO of Oppenheimer Funds
    Source: Quoted in Women of the Street (Sue Herera, 1997)
  • "One of the biggest mistakes women make in business is that they aren’t friendly enough."
    Charlotte Beers (1935–), US advertising executive and former under secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs in the US government
    Source: Fortune (1996)
  • "Running a business here in the UK, particularly being a woman, is just far too big a deal. The point at which some woman starts up a business and nobody cares about it, that's when we'll all know we made it."
    Barbara Cassani (1960–), US former CEO of Go
    Source: “Mount Holyoke College: Barbara Cassani '82, Soaring to New Heights,” Vista (2000)
  • "It's so much easier for men. They don’t have to paint their nails for a meeting."
    Eve Pollard (1945–), British journalist and newspaper editor
    Source: Quoted in Guardian (London) (December 30, 1995)
  • "Women are underserved and underestimated as consumers."
    Geraldine Laybourne (1947–), US chairman of Oxygen Media
    Source: “The 50 Most Powerful Women in American Business,” Fortune (Patricia Sellers and Cora Daniels, October 1999)
  • "Women are opening businesses at twice the rate of men … Forty percent of businesses will be owned by women. Women are saying, I don’t belong in this company. I'm sick of fighting this battle."
    Faith Popcorn (1947–), US trend expert and founder of BrainReserve
    Source: Interview, phenomeNEWS (1999)
  • "If you want to push something … you're accused of being aggressive, and that's not supposed to be a good thing for a woman. If you get upset and show it, you're accused of being emotional."
    Mary Harney (1953–), Irish politician
    Source: Attributed to
  • "Women actually do quite well on Wall Street because so much of this business is intuitive."
    Elizabeth MacKay, US investment strategist and managing director of Bear Stearns
    Source: Quoted in Women of the Street (Sue Herera, 1997)
  • "The men are always playing their own macho games. It's not really the money they want—it's beating their colleagues by making that extra phone call at night."
    Anonymous
    A senior female banker on her male colleages and why women are still rare at the top of the profession.
    Source: Quoted in The Moneylenders: Bankers in a Dangerous World (Anthony Sampson, 1981)
  • "What kind of nation is this…nation of silk knees, slender necks, narrow fingers, and ironic mouths which has established itself upon our boundaries?"
    Anonymous
    A complaint about the growing number of women in the modern business office.
    Source: Fortune (1935)
  • "I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career."
    Gloria Steinem (1934–), US entrepreneur, editor, and writer
    Source: Radio interview, LBC (April 2, 1984)
  • "I don’t play golf. I don’t go to the men's room. I didn’t have the ability to network the way men do. But I made myself visible."
    Jill Barad (1951–), US former CEO of Mattel
    Source: Wall Street Journal (1997)
  • "Men always try to keep women out of business so they won’t find out how much fun it really is."
    Vivien Kellems (1896–1975), US industrialist, feminist, and lecturer
    Source: Quoted in Women Can Be Engineers (Alice Goff, 1946)
  • "People assume you slept your way to the top. Frankly, I couldn’t sleep my way to the middle."
    Joni Evans (1942–), US publishing executive
    Conference speech to female executives, referring to her start in publishing as a manuscript reader.
    Source: New York Times (July 22, 1986)
  • "Women do not win formula one races, because they simply are not strong enough to resist the G-forces. In the boardroom, it is different. I believe women are better able to marshal their thoughts than men and because they are less egotistical they make fewer assumptions."
    Nicola Foulston (1958?–), British former CEO of the Brands Hatch group
    Source: Interview, Independent (London) (April 10, 1995)
  • "Do you know why it's so difficult to find a female CEO? It's because most women are sexually frustrated. Men are not because they can fall back on call girls, go to erectile dysfunction clinics. If you have a CEO who's sexually frustrated, she can’t act properly."
    Graham Boustred, South African businessman, former deputy chairman of Anglo-American mining
    Source: Quoted in Business Day (Johannesburg) (July 8, 2009)

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